Anglo-American relations and the past present: insights into an (ongoing) mythologisation of a special relationship

Abstract

Affiliative bonding between British and American publics has long been a source of both stability within Anglo-American relations and of legitimacy for British and American government cooperation. Yet hitherto relatively little attention has been paid to how public diplomats encourage these sentiments through influencing processes of remembering and forgetting the Anglo-American past. This is particularly important as their licence to do so is evidently increasing as generational change progressively confines to history experiential memory of the zenith of Anglo-American cooperation during World War Two. To explore how public diplomats draw particular memories into the present to support current objectives/narratives, this article combines memory and diplomacy studies in an analysis of bilateral summit meetings between US Presidents and British Prime Ministers. These meetings are chosen because they provide excellent opportunities for officials to refresh continually the popular myth of special Anglo-American relations by manipulating ‘figures of memory’ in their invocation of the ‘past present’.